Sixteen years

Governments from around the world are gathering in Poznań, Poland, as part of negotiations on an international agreement for tackling climate change.

They meet at a time when the world is in financial turmoil and old assumptions about how the world should work are being challenged.

They meet after a new US President has been elected but is not yet in power.

And they meet as climate change continues to impact communities around the world, from the Philippines to Peru, Australia to the Arctic, the Maldives to Malawi.

Just one year is left until an agreement needs to be reached in Copenhagen in December 2009. For hundreds of millions of the poorest people around the world, this is their last chance.

Back in 1992, 164 countries, including the US, UK and other EU member states, signed the United Nations framework convention on climate change, stating, “human activities have been substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, these increases enhance the natural greenhouse effect and this will result on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere and may adversely affect natural ecosystems and humankind”.

They also said “developed country parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof”.

I was in primary school when the UN agreement was reached. I remember learning about the greenhouse effect, the impact of burning coal, oil and gas, and the warming the world could see.

Sixteen years later the UK’s contribution to climate change is just 6 per cent less than in 1992. Europe’s carbon emissions have risen by 10 per cent, the US’s by nearly 20 per cent.

So far we have failed. But we do not have to keep on failing. I am off to Poznan to see what needs to be done now and in the next year. And to see what hope there is for climate justice for hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people.